The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895

Ostensibly the Sino-Japanese War was a conflict between Japan and
China for dominance over China's tributary, Korea. In reality, it was a
Japanese attempt to preempt Russian expansion down the Korean Peninsula
to threaten Japan. It was also the first of a two limited wars in
pursuit of an overarching policy objective: Japanese policymakers
believed that dominance over the Korean
Peninsula by any great power would directly threaten their national
security.
They sought to protect Japan first by expelling China in the
Sino-Japanese War and, then a decade later, by expelling Russia from
both Korea and southern Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War
(1904-1905). A quarter of a century later, continuing Russian
involvement in China and Japanese perceptions of the threat that this
entailed culminated in a second and much longer Sino-Japanese War
(1932-45). Although the policy of Russian containment is generally
associated with U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, in reality,
from the first Sino-Japanese
War to the end of World War II, Japanese policymakers had consistently
applied
containment to Russia.

The first Sino-Japanese War had an enormous impact on foreign
perceptions of Japan and China. Prior to the war, the popular 1885
British musical, The Mikado, expressed the prevailing
European view of Japan. The musical begins with a chorus of samurai
singing:

“If you want to know who we are, / We are gentlemen of
Japan: / On many a vase and jar - / On many a screen and fan, / We
figure in lively paint: / Our attitudes queer and quaint.”

The next verse proceeds,

“If you think we are worked by strings, / Like a Japanese
marionette,
/ You don't understand these things: / It is simply Court etiquette.”

This was the European view: A quaint Japan preoccupied with
stultifying rules of etiquette instead of the serious pursuits of
European powers. In contrast, China, greatly popularized by such
Enlightenment philosophers as Voltaire, continued to retain the respect
of the West. On the eve of war, the British-owned North-China
Herald described China as the “only great Asiatic State that
really commands the respect of the Great Powers of
the World.”

In less than one year all this changed. Despite China's vastly
larger population, army, and resource base, and despite its shorter
lines of communication, superior battleships, and years of military
modernization, it lost every battle
and lost badly. Its troops fled the field in disarray, abandoning vital
supplies,
and preyed on the local population. Meanwhile its civil officials
focused
more on preserving their own power at the expense of their domestic
rivals,
than on cooperating to defeat the foreign foe. Just as Chinese
corruption and incompetence disgusted, so Japanese military prowess and
professionalism impressed the war's foreign spectators.

In 1895 the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, Hilary A. Herbert, wrote:
“Japan has leaped, almost at one bound, to a place among the great
nations of the earth. Her recent exploits in the war with China have
focused all eyes
upon her, and the world now comprehends the startling fact that this
small
island kingdom, so little taken account of heretofore in the
calculations even of students and statesmen, has within a few decades
stridden over ground traversed by other nations only within centuries.”
The British journalist and expert on Asia, Sir Henry Norman, wrote
mid-war: “The war with China and
the treaty with England [of 1894 according Japan juridical equality]
will
at last force foreigners to see Japan as she is. The Japanese are a
martial
and proud race, with marvelous intelligence, and untiring energy and
enthusiasm.”

In contrast to Japan, the post-war European view of China was
anything but flattering. According to the official newspaper of the
Russian Foreign Ministry, Journal de St-Pétersbourg, “Since
the beginning of this war, the Chinese have provided a lamentable
spectacle. No one suspected such weakness.” One British expert on Asia,
Alexis Krausse, described China as “[c]orrupt to the core,
ill-governed, lacking cohesion and without means of
defending herself... To believe in the recuperative power of China is
mere
wasted faith... China as a political entity is doomed.”

These comments are based on the
research conducted for Dr. Paine's forth coming book, The
Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy,
to be published by Cambridge University Press in December of 2002.

The war changed perceptions in both the East and the West,
affecting the foreign policies of all those engaged in the Far East.
Perceptions of Chinese weakness led to far more aggressive foreign
intrusions, ushering in
the period known as “the scramble for concessions” when foreign powers
partitioned
China into spheres of influence. Conversely, perceptions of Japan's
strength
led to its inclusion in the ranks of the imperial powers. The 1902
Anglo-Japanese
alliance confirmed Japan's new status. This was Britain's only alliance
from
the end of the Napoleonic Wars until World War I.

A new balance of power had emerged. China's millennia-long regional
dominance had abruptly ended. Japan had become the dominant power of
Asia, a position it would retain throughout the twentieth century.
Japan had demonstrated the potentially global consequences of rapid
economic growth coupled with political transformation. In doing so, it
had proven that industrialization was not the cultural monopoly of the
West.

If the war catapulted Japan into the ranks of the powers, it
hurtled China on a long downward spiral. It shattered any basis for
China's tenacious sense of unbreachable superiority and forced a
Chinese reappraisal of their place in the world. Defeat by Japan, a
former member of the Confucian world, did this much more decisively
than any Western defeat, including those in the Opium Wars, ever did or
ever could. This was because defeat by an alien civilization could be
discounted whereas defeat by a former member of the Confucian order
could not. Equally shattered were any vestiges of political stability
in China. Victory by a transformed member of the Confucian order
fatally undermined the legitimacy of that order. For the Chinese, the
war kicked the bottom out of their world. A century later, they had yet
to find a satisfactory replacement for the stable Confucian order that
so long had formed the bedrock of Chinese thought.

The war also had an enormous impact on Russia. It caused a
fundamental reorientation of Russian foreign policy away from Europe to
Asia. The Russian government concluded that Japan constituted a major
threat to its weakly defended
Siberian frontier. Therefore, it rapidly accelerated plans for Russian
colonization
and development of Manchuria, making the fateful decision to run the
Siberian
railway, not along the northern bank of the Amur River as it does
today,
but straight through northern Manchuria to make a much shorter link
between
Lake Baikal and Vladivostok. When the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 heavily
damaged
the railway line, Russia responded by deploying over 100,000 troops to
occupy
all of Manchuria. The Japanese could only interpret these enormous
financial
and military commitments in Manchuria to mean one thing: Russia
intended
to minimize Japanese infiltration of the Asian mainland. These
competing
Russian and Japanese ambitions came to blows in the Russo-Japanese War.

The Sino-Japanese War marked the end of the old Confucian order and
its tributary system for conducting Far Eastern relations. As indicated
by the Anglo-Japanese alliance and the reorientation of Russian foreign
policy, the war also heralded a new era of global politics in which
Asian events would
have a direct impact on Europe.